Issue with refunding Visas

1

Hi All!

I just ran wine club. We are offering free shipping if a customer adds three bottles to their order. Of course, some requests to add to the order have come in after charging the credit card. Or, some pick ups would prefer to have it shipped and they want to add three bottles.

The way I handle this is to refund the entire original order, and place a new one with their additions. This typically works fine - and keeps us compliant and the customer informed on the new order. However, in the past few days I have not been able to refund orders paid for with a Visa. The refund is being declined.

We’ve contacted Worldpay about this, and they hadn’t seen this type of decline before. Where we ended up, which is basically an educated guess, is that Visa has us flagged for processing too many refunds. It has been apprx 20 refunds, which compared to the amount of orders we process seems minimal so I am surprised it is being flagged as potentially fraudulent. Worldpay really doesn’t have an answer for us, so we’re stuck not being able to refund anyone right now.

We are looking in to ‘Manage Credits’ to process refunds, but without refunding an order, you end up with an inventory issue.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? Or have any ideas on how to fix this? Any ideas would be appreciated! WineDirect is sure this is an issue with Worldpay and not them.

2

That sounds wild!

  1. What’s the reason/response you get when trying to process the refunds?

  2. Are you able to refund/credit through the WorldPay gateway?

  3. As somebody that once used WorldPay, I’d run for the hills. Change Merchant Solutions, AKA WineDirect Payments is a million times better. They have customer service you can get on the phone immediately and whom will respond to an email immediately. They can also help you set up Account Updater for AMEX and will be required for some of the web payments stuff coming down the pike. They’ll get you better rates too.

3

On the WorldPay portal, the Authorization/Denial Code for these failed transactions is “NX-Acknowledgement of Refund Request”; the Authorization Response Code is "05-Generic Decline (Do Not Honor). Worldpay says they’ve never seen that.

We ran a test on my VISA card, which declined. We then called my card issuing bank (Chase) who had no record of the attempted refund or decline on their side. WorldPay claims this is not a processing issue with them, but rather a software issue within WineDirect’s integration software.

We’ve opened a ticket with WineDirect. Not sure what will come out of it, but we are still not able to process refunds on Visas which if not already, is a disaster! I will let you know what comes out of it. Thanks for your response, the way it looks, we will need to look into another option. I don’t think we’ve tried a refund directly through Worldpay, I will look in to that now.

4

Yikes. Yeah, I’d try refunding through WorldPay as a workaround.

5

Hi Ed,

I just wanted to update you on what happened. Apparently Visa had changed their policy on refunds. I think it took awhile to get updated. So for over a week, we couldn’t refund, and then the issue magically fixed itself - so no real answer! Thanks for responding to us.

I think we may consider WD’s Payments. Although, we use Worldpay for Wholesale transactions, it might be the better option for DTC… will have to discuss that with them.

6

Yikes. WorldPay sucks.

Couple heads up from experience should you decide to leave. Beware of any cancellation fees they try to stab you with on the way out and make sure you proof in writing that they have canceled ALL aspects of your account (merchant account, gateway, etc.) as they are all separate.